It’s hard to shake off a feeling that one of the reasons broken beat hasn’t been given its critical due – certainly in comparison to other sides of the London soundsystem music continuum – is that journalists, and I include myself in this of course, are dorks. Broken beat, on the other hand, was always notable for being the province of sophisticated party people, people who very much walked the walk when it came to fashion, dance moves and committed involvement with nightlife, as well as deep rooted musical knowledge and musicianship. It’s easy to feel awkward and clumsy in a “bruk” dance, and I reckon that might be a significant part of why, despite being innovative, prolific and capable of rocking Carnival crowds and underground clubs alike, it’s not been written into the documentation of British lineages in the same way other styles have.
Received wisdom goes that the sound and tight-knit scene existed for a limited time from the late 90s to early 00s, centred around Goya Distribution in West London and the Co-Op club at Plastic People, then petered out with just occasional revivals and comebacks. But this misses the fact that the intensely hybrid quality of the music meant that it was always deeply connected into the fabric of things around it, and remains so now. It was certainly an intense fusion – of soundsystem oomph, jazz-dance intricacy, Afrobeat intensity, all with a Detroit techno futuristic vision to boot – but it brought in more besides. All through of its peak era, people from the worlds of soulful house (the late Phil Asher), UK garage (Zed Bias, particularly in his Phuturistix guise), experimental electronica (Mark Pritchard, Tony ‘Moody Boyz’ Thorpe) all had one foot in Co-Op, and the jungle/drum ’n’bass link was so total you’d be hard pressed to find a broken beat mainstay who hadn’t released on 4Hero’s pivotal Reinforced label.
The link is less direct, but you can even hear bruk in the more musicianly / funky early iterations of grime – think Terror Danjah, DaVinChe, Mizz Beats, early Scratcha: all at the very least swimming in the same melange of soundsystem music, soul, funk and electronics. And grime’s more funtimes little sibling UK funky practically was a rawer, rougher take on bruk: indeed one of the first pioneers of funky, Apple, listed his genre on MySpace as “broken beat”, and broken beat scene renegade Altered Natives produced an early key funky anthem in ‘Rass Out’. Most of all, though, broken beat overlapped with the much broader, genre-agnostic, soul-jazz based, “Gilles Peterson world”. Many of the scene players are jazz instrumentalists and/or scholars of jazz and close links span out through other nights at Plastic People (where residents including Floating Points, Josey Rebelle, Four Tet, Theo Parrish and founder Ade Fakile absorbed broken beat into their various personal flows) and other lynchpin club nights from Tokyo to Todmorden.
The fact that the soul-jazz continuum ran right through the centre of the broken beat scene also meant it was full of songs and singers: some of the greatest singers in the world in fact, including the likes of Eska, Valerie Etienne, Bembe Segue, Mpho Skeef and many more. (Props here to DJ and musician Sophie Callis for recently providing a roll-call of women in broken beat, further deconstructing the myth that it was a boys’ club closed shop.) And that has helped its continued influence run not just through underground scenes but through the longer, deeper streams of song-form genres, right up to the current ultra-fertile UK soul revival of recent years: the sounds of Cleo Sol, Jorja Smith, Children Of Zeus, Jaz Karis and all the rest emerge from a British lineage which has broken beat woven into its very nature.
On top of all that, while occasionally there is an actual official scene revival – a Back-to-Co-Op night or takeover at a festival – the key musicians involved have never stopped being prolific. IG Culture, Kaidi Tatham, Marc De Clive Lowe, Simbad, Marc Mac, Dego, the great Phil Asher until his passing in 2021, on it goes – all of them have made world class music. and collaborated with other musicians and scenes across continents and generations. So yes, broken beat as a “thing” may have had a specific location in time and space, it was never confined to just that, and it remains an absolutely vital element to British and global music quarter of a century after its first peak. These tracks might not be broken beat, but all of them are wired into it in some manner or means, and all of them carry its unique spirit.
D’Monk – ‘Don’t State The Obvious’ (Live)
The Touching Bass imprint and party organisation run by creative and life partners Errol and Alex Rita has been critical in keeping alive the same sense of sophistication, cultural scholarship and conviviality in Black and multicultural British music which ran through broken beat. So it’s no wonder so many of their releases channel its funky intricacy, as on this new EP with a live jam whose cuts and processing render the hoary old ÒThinkÓ breakbeat new and strange again.
Jorja Smith – ‘High’
The perfect example of how broken beat is just there in the fabric of British music. The rhythm to this is quite possibly more a nod to late 00s / early 10s UK funky, and to the Afro-house that has followed on from it – but by simply building a UK funky beat with live instrumentation and extreme production finesse, you’re going to end up reverse engineering bruk.
Kokoroko – ‘We Give Thanks’ (KeiyaA Remix)
The UK, and particularly London, jazz scene of course has been incandescently great in recent years, and a lot of that comes from having personnel whose feet have been on the dancefloors of Plastic People and similar clubs. Some of the musicians straight up play the patterns of bruk – drummer Moses Boyd is a key example – but there are other looser joining-of-dots that reconstitute the elements in new ways. Thus a London Afrobeat-jazz collective, remixed by a saxophonist from the South Side of Chicago who brings the more broken elements of her own city’s footworking music and London’s grime all into the mix…
PGMNT – ‘Watsu’
The more musicianly and groove-based sides of grime – the sides which butted up against broken beat – have, in the past two decades, looped back again and again into different fusions with house, and particularly South African house. That has come to the fore especially since the emergence of gqom and then amapiano, with many producers from the grime generation like Scratcha, Cooly G, Jon E Cash and co creating new and fresh hybrids. PGMNT is from that generation too, and has hit a really rich seam which infuses South African sonics and dynamics with all the London melting pot of influences that went into bruk in the first place.
Sampha & Little Simz – ‘Satellite Business 2.0’
Sampha may be best known as singer-songwriter, but he’s also an electronic explorer with both feet still on the Plastic People dancefloor. This transformation of a rarefied album interlude track into a duet packed with dancefloor power is a classic example of how the cascade of currents soul, Afrobeat, rap, dub and all the rest that make up broken beat still flow energetically through London and the UK’s musical DNA.
